An affordable option for building a cheap home library, 20th-century hardcover publishers book series included reprints of classics and publisher’s back catalog titles as well as newly commissioned titles. A few series dominated, such as Everyman’s Library and the Modern Library, but there are many others. These pages document the diversity of 20th-century reprint book series. Click on a series below for more information about the series.

English Series

The Ronald Press Company was established in 1900 and published well over 1000 titles, primarily textbooks and reference books, in the fields of business, accounting, taxation, sports, education, psychology, and technology. The Press had numerous nonfiction series: The Folk Dance Library, The Ronald Sports Library, the Ronald Aeronautic Library, the Wood Processing Series, the Ronald Series in History, the inexplicable Ronograph Library, and the ever-popular Tax Practitioners’ Library. Information on the company’s origins and history is nearly non-existent in typical sources and on the web.

Scattered throughout Ronald Press’ catalog are smaller format literary reprints and edited collections that are listed as the English Series and sometimes the Ernest Bernbaum English Series in WorldCat but that series name is not always indicated on the books or jackets of titles in the series. Bernbaum was the editor for a number of the literature titles published by the Ronald Press. He was an opponent of the woman’s suffrage movement, and later on the faculty of the University of Illinois.

Many of the titles in the Ronald Press English Series seem to be drawn from interrelated series published by Thomas Nelson, including Nelson’s English Series.

In 1977, according to the Wall Street Journal (September 23, 1977), “John Wiley & Sons Inc. agrees to acquire for cash ‘substantially all’ of stock of Ronald Press Co. Purchase will take place Oct 3 ’77.”

English Series titles, such as this copy of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, edited by Arthur E. Case and published in 1938, are the epitome of stoic book design. The jackets are distinctive for their lack of distinction, spare and devoid of decoration, blurbs, advertising for other books in the series, etc. The series name is even absent in this particular title. The jackets are, however, printed on heavy, coated, high-quality paper.

The rear of the jacket and rear flap are completely blank.

Books are of very good quality: in this case, heavy blue buckram with lighter blue typography.

The half-title page:

The title page:

The copyright page includes the date of publication as well as Library of Congress card number (which is not included on many other series books until the 1960s). A reproduction of the title page of the first volume of the first edition of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World), 1726.

Below find a semi-complete list of literary titles published by the Ronald Press, many of which were part of the publisher’s English Series. Variant series names are noted (as taken from WorldCat). As indicated above, the English Series name is not always included on the books (or their jackets).

1928: Selections from the Tattler, the Spectator, And Their Successors, Walter Graham, ed.

1929: The City Day: An Anthology of Recent American Poetry (Modern America Series of English Texts), Eda Lou Walton, ed.